


room to breathe

by scarletsymphony



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, F/M, Fix-It, Recovery from trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 21:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarletsymphony/pseuds/scarletsymphony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haymitch thinks she hates Gale.</p><p> <br/><i>If there's anything you're good at, sweetheart, it's holding a grudge.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	room to breathe

**Author's Note:**

> the last film reminded me how much I dislike the epilogue. this is my re-imagining of life after mockingjay. it is not a happy ending.

Haymitch thinks she hates Gale.

_If there's anything you're good at, sweetheart, it's holding a grudge._

Haymitch says a lot of things when he's drunk, and Katniss thinks most of it is to hear himself speak, pretend he has anything of importance to say as he pickles his brain in alcohol. If she were nice she'd keep those thoughts to herself, but she isn't; so she lays it out for him, flat and cool. He just laughs in her face before passing out. She leaves, dumping the loaves of bread she'd brought over next to his slack face on the way out.

It sticks in her head, though, what he said, and she finds herself thinking about it the next day on a hunt, when she should be focusing.

There _are_ some days she hates everything: the new Capitol, the new President, what's the left of District 12, all the Victors, dead or alive, Haymitch, Peeta. And yes, Gale.

Those days are happening less often, though.

That night she comes home empty handed, and Peeta pulls out cheese buns, reheats some leftover stew, and makes an apple pie. She eats all of it, and wonders if it means she's a bad person that she doesn't feel grateful to him.

It takes a while until she figures it out. During that time, she continues to eat Peeta's food and courier leftovers to Haymitch's. Then she starts spending the evenings at his place. They don't talk much. She cleans and fiddles with her hunting equipment, he busies himself in the kitchen, prepping for baking the next day. Eventually the evenings turn to nights in his bed, in his arms. One particularly cold winter night they have sex, and never really stop.

It becomes routine. Katniss thinks for Peeta it feels something like romance, by how he looks at her sometimes but to her it feels like inevitability. It's not a bad feeling, it doesn't feel wrong, exactly, but Katniss doesn't think anything will ever really feel right again.

It goes on like that for a while. It's hard for her to remember how many seasons it took because the fog lifted slowly, in increments. One bright day she's reading a new letter from her mother the in Capitol. She's helping run the hospital she helped build from the ground up, and apparently, life is going well. She misses Katniss, and so do all of her friends here, oh, won't she come visit in the summer, sometime?

It's then that it clicks for Katniss. She doesn't hate Gale. She didn't kill him, afterwards, in her grief for Prim: he had taken care of her family during the Games, saved her life and the lives of people she loved many times, sacrificed himself for her.

She knew all this to be true. So he didn't die with Prim, because she couldn't, because she was tired of death, because he didn't deserve it. She doesn't hate him, but she can't know him. Not after Prim.

For the first time, she answers one of her mother's letters.

_I can't come see you._

She hesitates, wondering what else to say. _We're doing fine here._

She gives it to Haymitch when he next leaves for the Capitol on the train, which he does sometimes. There are periods when he's more sober, more alert. He becomes restless, goes to the city, to Effie. He always returns, though. It's a reliably bi-annual cycle.

He doesn't even pretend he won't read it, laughing as she tries to snatch the envelope back from him.

_Wow, sweetheart, don't think you've written too much?_

She scowls and continues to do so as she watches the train pull out. Still, as she watches it get smaller and smaller into the horizon, she feels a knot in her chest loosen. She takes a deep breath, then another. Then she heads out into the forest. She has a day's work ahead of her still, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> when i fail to abide by the basic writing principle of show, don't tell, so thoroughly can i claim it's a stylistic choice or ~~experimentation? 
> 
> i may eventually write a second part that deals with katniss/peeta and children.


End file.
